Archive for September, 2008

The Anglican bishop Cirlot wrote a book on whether or not apostolic succesion is true (incidentally, its title is Apostolic Succession: Is It True? Practical name for his book, eh?). One of the objections he had to deal with to the Catholic position was that there seems to be a lot of Christians outside of of the visible Church. The Catholic view (not Roman–just universally held by Christians across the centuries; this is the view shared by Anglicans, Orthodox, and Roman Catholics) is that the Church is an organization with visible criteria of membership, instituted directly by Christ with a heirarchical structure that has sacramental grace. The Church is a polis, a city or nation of sorts–not an earthly one, surely, but a true polis none the less.

Cirlot mentions the arguments of the archbishop of Cantebury William Temple for the conclusion that Protestants are fully the Church in just as unqualified a way as the Catholics (which here designates Anglicans, Orthodox, and Romans). The main argument is from the superabundance of grace that we see outside the Church. The moral and spiritual character of Protestants is not excellent across the board; there are some bad apples. But there are so many good Protestants that it makes the Catholic view of the Church improbable. How could a Catholic possibly deny that a good Protestant is in the Church?

This would be the final part of my paper on the category of Supererogation in a proper Christian ethical system. Hopefully this final part helps people to see a little bit more what I’ve got in mind by my denial of the supererogatory for a Christian ethical system. Also, for those few who have commented, I will do my best to get to those now that I’ve finished posting this. Thanks for your patience.(more…)

So, one might have noticed that the posting of my paper stopped kinda in the middle and I’ve been generally inactive on the blog for a while (or you might not have noticed at all because you’re just here for the more intelligent posters here). The reason for this is that my hard drive crashed and I lost everything on it and I’ve had endless troubles getting my computer back into full working condition. I was able to recover this paper from email so here goes the next installment of my paper on supererogation.(more…)

This is the first post in a series about the Orthodox view of justification.

In this post I will build off of the assumption (argued for in my post on natural consequences titled “Death and Natural Union”) that Pauline language of “in Adam” and “in Christ” includes natural union, and not just covenantal union. I will draw out the implications of this idea with respect to justification and try to answer objections to it. This is a long post, but if you want to get a grasp of the Orthodox view of justification and how it relates to Christology, then take a look. (more…)